The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko: 20 things about his death we have learned this week

Were it an episode in a lurid spy thriller, it would be dismissed as too fantastical: a dissident intelligence officer, a thorn in the side of a ruthless and unforgiving regime, dispatched in the most inventively terrifying of ways – by nuclear poisoning.

Not only that. Hotels, restaurants and offices in the western city in which he is assassinated are drenched in radiation as his incompetent killers – unaware of the lethality of the weapon they are wielding – spread it around like so much perfume, endangering the lives of thousands of unwitting people.

The inquiry into the death of Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko has, in its first two days, heard some of the most astonishing evidence ever given in an English courtroom.

London, we were told this week, was subjected to a “miniature nuclear attack” as someone, most likely former members of the Russian Federation’s internal security service, the FSB, sought to kill Mr Litvinenko, until recently one of their own.

The former spy, living in exile in Britain, supposedly under the protection of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, suffered a lingering death at the age of 44 after being poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

It was administered, police believe, in a cup of tea spiked by Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, FSB operatives now sheltered by the Russian government. This act of “unspeakable barbarism” – it took the victim 23 painful days to die – resulted in what was described as this country’s “most dangerous ever” post mortem examination as pathologists worked on the victim’s irradiated body.

On Tuesday, a public inquiry began into the circumstances surrounding Mr Litvinenko’s killing, a full eight years after his death in November 2006. The hearing, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, is largely the result of a dogged campaign by his Russian-born widow, Marina, and is likely to be the most dramatic of its kind since the inquiry into the death in July 2003 of the biological weapons analyst David Kelly.

Mr Litvinenko’s “crime” was the most serious possible in Russia. He dared to expose the criminality behind the regime of President Vladimir Putin, himself a former intelligence officer. On the first day of the inquiry, Mr Putin was labelled a “common criminal” who consorts with the Russian mafia. So angry was he with this description that he sent long-range bombers into the English Channel to test British air defences – surely a first in the history of legal challenges.

Evidence – some of it too secret to be heard in public – will continue until March before a report is published towards the end of the year. So, what has the world learnt in the first two days of evidence concerning the murder of Mr Litvinenko?

1 The relationship between the Kremlin and Russian organised crime syndicates around the world is so close as to make the two effectively indistinguishable, said Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for Mrs Litvinenko. The startling truth will be revealed in evidence showing how the Russian mafia is controlled directly from the office of Mr Putin.

2 Mr Litvinenko, who received an allowance from fugitive British-based Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, was advising not only MI6 but Spain’s intelligence services. He helped an investigation into links between the Kremlin and Spanish-based members of the Tambov-Malyshev gang, Russia’s biggest crime syndicate. It was said by Spanish prosecutors to be “one and the same” with the Kremlin.

3 Mr Litvinenko’s MI6 cover name during his exile in Britain was Edwin Redwald Carter.

4 Polonium-210, a rare and expensive isotope created only in nuclear reactors, may have been chosen not as a terror weapon to scare off other dissidents but, if treated carefully, as a virtually undetectable poison. Its presence would be noticed only if tests were conducted for alpha particle emissions, deadly to organs and bone marrow if ingested. Post mortem examinations do not screen for such things. Alpha particles can be contained by glass, making polonium-210 hard to detect at distance and easier to smuggle through airport security than gamma-emitting radioactive isotopes. The polonium used was pure, making it impossible to source. Impurities, if present, provide the signature of a particular reactor.

^{Sir Robert Owen the chair of the Litvinenko Inquiry arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London}

5 The polonium used to kill Mr Litvinenko would have cost “tens of millions of dollars” if bought on the open commercial market. Such a costly method of assassination would not have appealed to a criminal organisation, but it would have come free to a Russian state-sponsored operation, simply being delivered from a government-owned reactor. There is no suggestion of a black market in polonium operating anywhere in the world. The only facility in Russia said to be producing polonium-210 is Avangard, a laboratory owned by the federal nuclear agency Rosatom.

6 If the polonium was meant to be undetectable, it may explain why the alleged assassins were so careless with a poison capable of harming themselves and relatives who accompanied Lugovoy on one of three missions to London connected with the murder. The inquiry heard that Lugovoy and Kovtun may have assumed the poison was chemical rather than radioactive. Lugovoy allowed his son, who accompanied him on one trip to London, to shake hands with a contaminated Mr Litvinenko. In the event, the killers left a trail of radiation through London like “the breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel”.

7 “Many thousands of members of the public, including British residents and visitors from overseas, might have been at risk from radioactivity,” the inquiry was told.

8 Between 1996 and 2001, Kovtun lived in Germany, working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant in Hamburg. There, he became friendly with a waiter referred to in court as D3. On Oct 28 2006, Kovtun flew from Moscow to Hamburg with a phial of polonium. Two days later, he met D3 and asked him if he knew a chef in London who would be willing to poison food or drink. Kovtun described Mr Litvinenko as “a traitor with blood on his hands” who dealt with terrorists from Chechnya. D3 did not take him seriously until after Mr Litvinenko’s death.

9 Lugovoy and Kovtun tried to kill Mr Litvinenko not once but twice. On Oct 16 2006, they laced a glass or jug of water with polonium during a meeting with their target at the Mayfair offices of the British security company Erinys. The water spilled and contaminated the tablecloth. Mr Litvinenko was exposed to a small dose of the poison but recovered after vomiting that evening.

10 The second, successful assassination attempt occurred in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair when the assassins tried again on Nov 1. Mr Litvinenko ingested the poison after taking three or four sips of tea served from a silver-coloured teapot while meeting his killers. Although “submicroscopic” in volume, the dose was “far in excess of known survivability limits”.

11 The case is the only recorded example of deliberate polonium poisoning anywhere in the world.

12 The Metropolitan Police deployed 100 detectives and 100 uniformed officers to find Mr Litvinenko’s killers and trace the path of the polonium-210 through the capital. Three-dimensional graphics produced by the investigators were coloured green, yellow, red and purple, the latter signifying the highest level of contamination. Alpha radiation in some locations – and on the fatal teapot – was off the scale of measuring equipment.

13 Lugovoy undertook the second of his three trips to London between Oct 25 and 28 2006, staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Park Lane in room 848. The room was found to have been heavily contaminated, with hotspots on the floor, walls and even the toilet seat. Readings taken from the bin in the bathroom were, again, off the scale.

14 MI6 denies that Mr Litvinenko was a double agent working for Britain during his time in the FSB. The inquiry was told he became an adviser to the Secret Intelligence Service in 2003, after fleeing to Britain with his wife and son via Turkey in 2000. He was given an allowance and an encrypted mobile telephone and assigned a handler using the name Martin. One of the venues used by the two men was the Piccadilly branch of the bookseller Waterstones. On Oct 31, the day before he was poisoned, Mr Litvinenko met Martin in the store’s cafe. Martin drank coffee; his source chose hot chocolate and pastries. Mr Litvinenko’s last conversation with Martin was on Nov 19 as the Russian lay dying in hospital.

15 Sir Robert Owen, the High Court judge and chairman of the inquiry, has ruled out an examination of MI6’s performance in regard to Mr Litvinenko’s safety.

16 Of his poisoning, the dying Mr Litvinenko told police: “When I left the hotel, I was thinking there is something strange. I knew that they wanted to kill me, actually. Everyone was saying, 'That’s just another of your whims.’ But I knew that they wanted to kill me because I was told about it.”

17 When Mr Litvinenko was first admitted to hospital in London, doctors suspected radiation poisoning, but tests for more common gamma effects proved negative. It was a scientist from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston who suggested testing Mr Litvinenko’s urine for alpha radiation, which was first carried out on Nov 21. Polonium poisoning was confirmed on Nov 23 2006, hours before the patient’s death at University College Hospital. Without urine tests, the cause of death would most likely have remained a mystery.

18 For two days, Mr Litvinenko’s body remained where it was due to its radioactive state. It had to be transported to a secure room in two body bags, so heavy was the contamination.

19 The ensuing post mortem examination was described during the inquiry as one of the most dangerous ever undertaken in the western world. Nathaniel Cary, the consultant forensic pathologist who examined the body, wore two protective suits, his gloves taped at the wrists. Filtered air was pumped into his plastic hood. His team consisted of a second pathologist, a police detective and a photographer, all similarly clothed. A radiation protection specialist stood by to wipe contaminated blood off the men, while paramedics were waiting to evacuate anyone falling ill.

20 Mr Litvinenko had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin due the radiation contamination in his body. He rests in Highgate Cemetery, north London. In his last days, he said that although he would die, it would be as a free man. He related how he once took his son to the Tower of London to show him the Crown Jewels, telling him to defend Britain to his last drop of blood because it had saved his family.